Book Review

The following review of ‘Adam’ is from ‘The Weekend Australia’ (a leading national newspaper) on 2 March 2019. It was written by Roy Williams (see below).

In his bestselling 2006 polemic The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins pronounced that “religion has been completely superseded by science”. A corollary of this worldview — reflexively held by hundreds of millions of atheists across the West — is that the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis stand utterly discredited.

The sneering wisecracks are familiar. The universe as we know it didn’t spring up in six 24-hour days! Eve wasn’t made from Adam’s rib! Snakes don’t talk!

Those who press such childish “arguments” are usually not qualified to make them. They have not even tried to grapple with all the relevant fields of knowledge. Apart from several branches of science, these include theology, philosophy, anthropology, archeology, ancient history, hermeneutics and linguistics. Dawkins’s sole area of genuine expertise is biology. Otherwise his mind seems small and closed.

Yet we live in an age of hyper-specialisation. It’s hard for anyone to digest, let alone master, all the pertinent information about human origins. It’s harder still to synthesise it fairly, in a form accessible to the contemporary reader.

Certainly the effort must be made, but it requires judgment and courage as well as erudition. Genesis is a minefield. Even the greatest biblical scholars tread with caution.

One thinks of the likes of Henri Blocher, whose 1984 masterpiece In the Beginning is a model of thoughtful exegesis. Now an Australian lay Christian, Tom Croucher, has taken the plunge. Adam: The First Human? is a fresh take on a perennial debate.

By his own admission, Croucher’s only formal academic training is in mathematics. Otherwise, his background is in high-school teaching, software engineering and local government. In short he’s a talented amateur — an old-fashioned polymath in the tradition of Blaise Pascal — who’s been researching the issues since 2002.

Crucially, he found a publisher in Albatross Books (a small but significant Sydney-based house that published John Harris’s monumental work of indigenous history, One Blood).

Croucher’s stated aim is ambitious, even audacious: “To provide an interpretation of Genesis that is supported by the current understanding of each relevant discipline”.

The range of his sources is rather limited. Nevertheless, I found his main thesis worthy of serious consideration (and will summarise it presently). But first it’s instructive to ponder why Croucher is likely on a hiding to nothing.

Hard-boiled atheists will dismiss him out of hand. Why? Because he is a confessed and (mostly) orthodox monotheist who believes that God created the universe with humankind in view. He also “upholds the Christian scriptures” as “authoritative and inspired”.

Equally, however, Croucher must expect to be trenchantly criticised by Christians who hold to a literal (or “traditional”) interpretation of Genesis. Such people are far more prevalent in the US than in Australia, but they exist here too.

Croucher will disappoint them because he accepts some central findings of modern scholarship: the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species about 200,000 years ago, by evolutionary means, and the emergence of recognisable “civilisation” about 12,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia. He pinpoints the 4th millennium BC as key to human cultural development: by then agriculture and animal husbandry had become sophisticated, and (circa 3500 BC) writing was invented. Perhaps a more serious problem for Christian purists will be Croucher’s rejection of the doctrine of Biblical “inerrancy”, at least as that controversial term is narrowly construed.

In his opinion: “If there are long-held beliefs that are no longer supportable as they are demonstrably untrue, then we have to relinquish them. … [W]e must pursue interpretations that are consistent and credible.”

Croucher rightly remarks that this is a “balancing act”. Scripture warns repeatedly against human beings trusting too much in their own understanding (cf. 1 John 4:5). On the other hand, Croucher reminds us that so mighty a theologian as St Augustine (AD 354-430) excoriated Christians who stuck stubbornly to “nonsensical” or “embarrassing” views of Genesis.

We now have access to 1600 years of additional knowledge and Genesis must be construed in its light. As Croucher writes, “if all truth is God’s truth — as it surely is — we need not be afraid of the consequences”.

Here is a telling example of what he has in mind. In most translations of Genesis, many of the leading figures, including Adam himself, are recorded as having lived up to 900 years. Croucher rejects this as literal truth: ancient Hebrew scribes, he suggests convincingly, misapplied the much older Sumerian dating system. (This gels with Psalm 90:10.)

More fundamentally, Croucher’s basic thesis is that Genesis is “neither science nor myth”. Adam and Eve, he contends, were not the first human beings. They were not the genetic ancestors of everyone alive today, and their disobedience in Eden did not give rise to physical death in nature.

Properly read, the Bible does not say so. Rather, Adam and Eve were real people who lived in Sumer around 3100-3030BC, “the dawn of written history”. Eden was a real, identifiable place. Adam and Eve are best understood as the first known prophets of the biblical God (Yahweh), and the first deliberate sinners. Adam or one his descendants may have written the first few chapters of Genesis. At any rate, his story “explains human nature”.

For further details, open-minded seekers should read the book. It is thought-provoking and valuable.

Roy Williams has been a regular non-fiction book reviewer for the Weekend Australian since 2006.  His background is in law. He won the Sydney University Medal in 1986 and spent twenty years in the profession before turning his hand to writing. His first and best-known book, God, Actually (2008), was a defence of Christianity for the educated layperson. A best-seller in Australia on release, it has since been published in Britain and North America. Roy’s next three books focused on Australian history and society – In God They Trust? The religious beliefs of Australia’s prime ministers (2013), Post-God Nation? (2015), and Mr Eternity: The story of Arthur Stace (2017).